6 Monsters

Someone (not in the animation industry) mentioned to me over the weekend that “all those computer movies look so real”. With all of the hyper realistic CG animation in theaters in the recent years, it’s easy to get the notion that CG = photoreal, but that does not have to be the case.

Take for instance PDI’s 1999 short film “Fishing”, directed by David Gainey. This film used NPR techniques to achieve a look of a watercolor painting. While the final look is one of a traditional medium, the technology involved in it’s creation is every bit as complex as that which helped create “Shrek”.

We did our own project that utilized a NPR technique. It was the signal film for this year’s Omaha Film Festival (OFF). In addition to the “toon”render, we also dropped our frame rate in order to better mimic a traditional animated project.

I think that television is where [Read more…]

Now that Alex Kirwan is back from his European jaunt, we’re able to see the first pass on color for the monsters. I’m sure he’ll be posting soon to tell us more about them.

And we started looking at everyone’s storyboards for their sections. I’ll share some later this week.

–Fred

So a bunch of us went to see “Over the Hedge” yesterday. It was a pretty decent film. If you’ve been following the blog for “Six Monsters”, you’ll know that we’re going to be doing fur on Buck. Well, the fur (and FX in general) in “Over the Hedge” were top notch. They worked so well, you almost didn’t notice them (which is a huge compliment). The characters were 100% believable in their appearance.

I’m not sure if any Dreamworks people are reading this, but if so, nice work! You’ve raised the bar. I’m going to revisit Buck’s fur solution as a result.

So we got a color sketch for Buck and Gailard yesterday. I really like these colors, especially for Buck. We’ll be revising our textures and such accordingly in the next few days.

Nice stuff, Alex!

-Floyd

So here’s the most recent facial sheet for Buck.

J Chad looked at a lot of classic animation characters to help see what kinds of poses would look best with a character of this type. There’s some Felix, Cubby, Bosko, early Mickey, and more in here.

-Floyd

So here is where we are at with Buck’s fur.

The colors and textures aren’t final yet, but we thought we’d take a more refined look at the fur. We can swap colors and such later.

One thing we may need to do is to raise up Buck’s hat just a bit so the fur doesn’t cut through.

Anyway, as always, let us know what you think!
-Floyd

So today is an all staff meeting with the other Frederator/Random Cartoons/Nickelodeon people. We showed up for the meeting a week early. Here’s our photo at Nickelodeon from last week.

Left to right: Chris Boylan, Veronica Harper, Mike Kopa, Floyd Bishop (me), Arielle Sekula, and Bill Cabey. Not pictured in the photo (because they weren’t on the trip with us) are J Chad Erekson, Kevin Wisdom, and our brand new intern Brendan McDevitt.

Talk to you later on!
-Floyd

So where would the Six Monsters go to school, and what would that look like? Well for our segement, we pictured the school as being an older style, kind of like the school in “Pleasantville”.

Here you can see some model pack drawings by J Chad Erekson of the door, and then a close up of how the door knob and hinges look.

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So, we go away for a week and the Six Monsters blog goes silent? Well, we’re back and ready to fill the void! Stephen needs something to read!

Anyway, we went to Nickelodeon the first day. What a nice bunch of people and what great offices! We met a bunch of people and saw a ton of cool projects.

The reason we were out in LA was for E3, which is a huge industry trade show for videogames. We met a lot of cool people.

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One of our commenters was rightly confused about the style of Six Monsters.

As I think I mentioned elsewhere this short is being written and directed by several different creative teams, all contributing to the same cartoon, sort like an animator jam session. One of the experiments here –and like all experiments, it could work or not– is that each team will interpret their cartoon in their own visual style. With this Six Monsters short, one minute will be 3D, the others are 2D. In the future, who knows? The ratio could keep changing.

So, the confusion is here because Floyd is such a fantastic and prolific blogger, and so far, only Dan has put up a post with his artwork. As the others come online, you’ll see their styles too.

–Fred